Benny the Blue Whale

October 23, 2023
British children’s writer Stanton (The Story of Matthew Buzzington) recounts in this quirky outing his efforts to test ChatGPT’s authorial skills by asking it to “tell me a story about a blue whale with a tiny penis.” He reproduces an edited transcription of the ensuing back and forth, accompanied by copious footnotes commenting on storytelling craft and his thoughts about working with the program. Thanks to Stanton’s outlandish prompts (“Tell me a story of how Benny was resurrected in an underwater cave a hundred years after his death and how his resurrected tiny penis could glow and cure sea creatures”), the absurd AI-generated narrative follows Benny the whale as he learns to accept his penis’s tininess, dies, then becomes sanctified by warring underwater religious sects. The real draw, though, is Stanton’s breakdown of ChatGPT’s craft. He’s thrilled when the program includes eccentric, unprompted narrative details, as when it “slyly implies a rich backstory” by observing that there were “even a few octopuses” at Benny’s funeral, but concludes the technology is fatally hampered by a debilitating reliance on cliché and repetitive syntax. The irreverent tone buoys a surprisingly thoughtful exploration of how AI might aid artists, and the ways in which it comes up short against its human competitors. This fascinates.